


The Mellified Man

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: Melt! [3]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Crossdressing, Hypnotism, M/M, Murder, Sensory Deprivation, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 00:51:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14344500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: New pleasure.





	The Mellified Man

**Author's Note:**

> While the violence in this story is no more graphic than anything that happens on the show, the discussion of suicide may be too much for some readers. Please use your discretion.  
> New Pleasure is a song by Richard Hell and the Voidoids.  
> It's a series! Its title comes from the song by Siouxsie and the Banshees of the same name.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and goodnight.

The world is made for some people. From the time they’re born, they know it, and never have reason to doubt. When the world isn’t made for you, when it’s coldly indifferent or actually hostile to all you are, you have to remake the world in your image. Gerald knew that. There wasn’t even anything really wrong with Gerald, nothing to keep him from living like anyone else. Gerald had to find something wrong. Gerald fought desperately to make himself a monster.  
It’s a lot to live up to.  
Whatever Gerald was or wasn’t, he did try to make the world the place he wanted it to be. In between the terror and the grasping need to be recognized, there was a vein of greatness. To merely dare is a great thing. You’ve already done so much, without even moving. Maybe it’s the way they are that matters; not what they do. Maybe you can be a monster- a madman- a genius- just by existing. It’s in your blood. It could be that Jonathan was always going to end up this way. Born of whatever was in Gerald, Jonathan was tainted. Life is a virus. Some kinds of life must simply be closer to sickness.  
There’s comfort in that. Jonathan doesn’t get out much, these days. His work seems to have plateaued. The problem is him. The natural world is kaleidoscopic, always shifting, always revealing. If you’re too stupid to see it, though, no experiment will help you. Maybe the artists have it right, and mastery comes through repetition. Discovery is fractal; reach the end, and you’re back at the beginning.  
At night, he and Jervis sometimes go out. If they roam far enough down the road, they find a small town. There are always people leaving someplace too late, lingering in parks and alleys. They’re looking for fun and adventure. The world was made for them, and even their boredom is blessed. They find what they’re looking for.  
Jervis and Jonathan flip a coin. If Jonathan wins, the stranger rides in the trunk of their car. If Jervis wins, the stranger drives them. They drive into the darkness, to the ubiquitous wastelands, now-barren pastures, half-cleared wood. If it’s Jonathan’s night, he uses the gas. In repetition, there is variety. He tries different concentrations of his compounds. He makes new mixtures. If they’re sufficiently lucid to respond, he talks to the subjects. What are they seeing? How do they feel? He draws blood. Before and after. Death is a scientist, experimenting on the body in its own ways. Fleetingly, sometimes, Jonathan thinks that there must be a way to isolate all that death is. Though, it wouldn’t be death. It would be the perfume of death. You could get close to it, smell it, without it touching you. When it’s Jervis’ night, he has the stranger take them home. There, they take whatever the stranger might have of value. If the stranger lives alone, the stranger kills themself. People will be sad, but not surprised: loneliness is so private, and so terrible. If they don’t live alone, it’s easier to explain, still. A domestic dispute. No one knows a person until they live with them. Even in a small town, such things aren’t uncommon. Perhaps, they’re more common, still than in the city, where there are always places to go on the lonely nights or to walk off anger or sadness, other strangers who feel the same way you do. The city is a place of human oddities; sometimes frightening, but ultimately ordinary. Remoteness suits Jonathan, and he thinks it suits Jervis. What habitation bordering someplace wild and untouched doesn’t have stories about strange shapes coming out of the night?  
They can’t do it all the time. It’s not practical. Jervis gets a cold, and stays in bed all day and night, wrapped in robes and coats, with his gloves on. Jonathan brings him tea with rum, and Jervis falls asleep with his head back and his mouth hanging open, making a sound like rust on rust. He talks in his sleep, a pudding of nonsense that Jonathan records and mines at idle moments for the stuff of nightmares. There’s very little of use to anyone but a painter. Jerome talked all the time about art. Jonathan’s beginning to think that Jerome didn’t really know much about it.  
Even after Jervis recovers, he wants to stay in. It’s late in winter, when it’s no longer cold, but merely chilly; a damp chill that cramps Jervis’ hands and makes his knees ache. With some fascination, Jonathan watches Jervis hold his watch up to the phone and compel a supermarket delivery man to bring them what they need. After the man puts everything away, Jervis tells him to get into his car, drive to the border, amuse himself for the weekend, and return to home and work on Monday, disheveled and smelling of liquor.  
“Others would wonder as to his fate,” Jervis says apologetically, “but not if he were to reappear, worse for wear, at a later date.”  
At night, sometimes, they walk around the house together. This is what Jervis does when he can’t sleep and Jonathan works into the night, but for all of that wandering, he doesn’t do very much exploring on his own.  
“I only try to tire myself out,” he explains, “It’s more fun to investigate one’s surroundings when one has company.”  
Whoever the house’s former inhabitants were, they were a varied bunch. In the closets, Jonathan and Jervis find the clothes of men and women, old and young. They find garments that haven’t been in style for decades.  
“Relics of times past,” Jervis muses, “From days when things were made to last.”  
A lot of it is to Jervis’ taste, but not in his size.  
“I could alter them for you,” Jonathan says.  
“That would be most kind of you,” Jervis says quietly.  
When they wake the next day, in that milky hour that isn’t day or night or twilight, but seems to exist at all three stations, Jervis stands on a chair as Jonathan pins the cuffs of his pants. There’s a sewing machine, tucked into an odd corner of the house, half library and half greenhouse, for its skylight and great windows. There’s an old record player there, too, and Jervis puts on a record that wobbles out a tinny waltz.  
That night, they return to the closets. They find brown leather and velvet, which Jonathan puts away for a time when needs to repair himself. They find furs too dense and too dark to have come from a real animal. It must have been a beast from a dream. A black griffin, with talons as cold as the night air. In bed, Jervis piles the furs on top of himself.  
They find beaded ballgowns that entrance with their shivering, slithering sound. They find ancient tuxedos with wads of bar napkins in the pockets. When they go out again, Jervis wears a tuxedo tailored to fit him like a glove. After they’ve finished their work, they return home, and Jonathan touches Jervis through his clothes in the windowed room. They disentangle themselves, and Jervis soaks his underwear in the bathroom sink before getting into bed next to Jonathan.  
They find galoshes in a hall closet, hanging open like pigs in a butcher’s shop window.  
They find boxes of women’s hats decked in feathers plucked from extinct bird species.  
They find satin sleep masks, and opera gloves, which Jonathan takes back their bedroom.  
They find drawers and drawers of pale, delicate lingerie. Looking at it, Jervis sighs Alice’s name.  
Jonathan joins him over the drawer, and Jervis starts. Above his shirt collar, his throat colors. Jonathan runs a lacy peach thing through his gloved hand. He takes it from the drawer, and returns to the closet.  
They drift into the hallway. In a linen closet, Jonathan finds a white pillowcase, yellowed with age but still scented with lavender. When he cuts eyeholes in it, it looks like the mask he wore in Arkham. He sleeps in one of the satin sleep masks and, having failed to jam his fingers into the opera gloves, men’s leather gloves, the pillowcase and negligée under his pillow.  
It rains every night for a week, so there’s no point in going out. It would be a long, wet trudge to the town, and no one would be out. Sighing, Jervis watches the rain at the window in the lab, tugging at the handkerchief up his sleeve.  
“I’m tired,” Jonathan says, and Jervis turns around.  
“Early as it may be, I’m also weary” Jervis says, yawning a little.  
Jonathan doesn’t ask him to, but Jervis still waits in the bathroom until Jonathan tells him to come back into the bedroom. It has become by now, Jonathan thinks, Jervis’ private game. Maybe he’ll like this one.  
“You can come in,” Jonathan says.  
Jervis gasps. “It’s-”  
“It’s not a good fit, but I couldn’t alter it without ruining it.”  
Hands before him like a sleepwalker, Jervis comes closer. “It’s better for not fitting properly,” he murmurs. The material is very thin, so that when he touches it, he’s almost touching Jonathan. It’s as though the garment is literally a second skin. A temporary membrane made to be shed. A transitional appendage. A caterpillar’s extra legs. A young hoatzin’s claws. Through the silk, Jonathan feels the cold of Jervis’ fingers. He shivers. When he exhales against the pillowcase, the air rebounds into his face, warming him.  
“You must leave it on,” Jervis says gravely, “Will you leave it on?”  
“Yes. I want you to do something for me.”  
“Anything,” Jervis says.  
“I’m going to cover my eyes and lie still. I want you to be very quiet. Don’t speak. Try not to breathe audibly. You can pretend that I’m asleep.”  
Jervis smiles. “And what shall I do?” He lays his hand over Jonathan’s heart.  
“I don’t care, but I want it to be a surprise.”  
Still smiling. “That’s very dangerous. I could do anything to you.”  
“I don’t think you’d harm me.”  
“Why’s that?”  
“You have too good a time doing things that I like.”  
Jervis laughs.  
“I’m going to lie down.”  
“All right,” Jervis says quietly.  
It’s cold, because Jonathan’s almost naked, but it’s warm and close because of the masks. He can breathe, but the air is hot and thick and smells of lavender. It’s impenetrably dark. He feels his heart beat more slowly and regularly even as his nerves seem to vibrate to the surface of his skin, dumb and obedient like iron shavings to a magnet. Waiting to be swayed this way or that.  
Jervis’ hands on him. Touching both his skin, and the material. Where Jervis touches material, the sensation is slightly muted, though the pressure seems greater, somehow. For a long time, he just touches Jonathan, caresses him, not even in a particularly sexual way. It’s soft and gentle, and quietly overwhelming. Jonathan feels himself breathing heavily, not even sure of why he’s experiencing such a strong reaction to something so innocent. Maybe his nerves truly have migrated to the surface of his skin. Maybe his nerves are now as fucked as his brain. All of him doomed to feeling forever things that batter him so intensely and for so long that they stop being either painful or pleasurable. They simply are. When you can’t get away, it simply is.  
Jervis’ mouth is on his neck, then turning his head to the side, on his shoulder. A puff of hot air against the pillowcase, at the approximate location of Jonathan’s mouth. Jervis moves Jonathan’s arms, lays Jonathan out, cruciform, runs his mouth down the length of one of Jonathan’s arms, probably following a vein. He brings Jonathan’s hand up to his mouth, brushes his lips against Jonathan’s wrist. He sucks Jonathan’s fingers, runs them, wet with saliva, over his skin. He moves aside the negligée, kisses Jonathan’s body, turning and repositioning Jonathan as he does. He touches Jonathan between his legs, then kisses him there, then presses their bodies together. Jonathan can feel all of him. He has before, but now, the feeling is all there is. It’s a strange, bruised feeling. A heavy, hot crush. With a stupid kind of detachment, Jonathan remarks to himself that it hurts. It’s not quite pain. It’s something else. In a way, it’s better than an orgasm, because that’s the end. That must be why people call it death. You’re finished, and there’s nothing left to do. Your body discourages it, if it doesn’t make it impossible. Nature tells you: you’re not supposed to want more. Of this, though, you can have as much as you want. There’s no end to the agony.  
Would you want there to be?  
Jervis has been very good about remaining silent, so Jonathan only knows that it’s over when he feels the decisive spasm of Jervis’ body, the pulse of semen against his belly where Jervis pulled up the negligée. Jervis’ tongue on the same place, rougher than it has to be. Jervis sucks him off, and the funny thing is that it’s actually the least interesting thing that’s happened tonight. Maybe Jonathan was right. Maybe all of him is fucked. Maybe he’s never going to be normal, or even feel normal things again.  
That’s what he wanted, isn’t it? Normal people get everything, but they don’t get this. They don’t get to decide. They don’t get to learn what they want. They don’t have to learn. The world already looks like them, so they don’t get to remake it in their image.  
Jonathan pulls off the pillowcase and the mask, finds Jervis lying against him, breathing heavily, his head on Jonathan’s chest. The fresh air is cold and raw, like the living breath of the world, like a gas that makes people mad, pouring into Jonathan’s lungs. He breathes in deeply. He kisses Jervis. He tastes himself.

No, you wouldn’t want it to be over.


End file.
